Diptych: The Meaning of Wealth
In Diptych, blog editor Timothy Barr juxtaposes two quotes from distant historical periods. Their “family resemblance” suggests a hidden genealogy of a modern thought.
The Opulence of a Tyrant Is the Poverty of His Subjects
Gold Is But a Dream—For Those Who Don’t Have Even a Cent
The first image is an emblem from one of the many copies of Alciatus’ Emblemata, the work that inaugurated its eponymous genre. The image bears the Latin maxim, The Opulence of Tyrants Is the Poverty of Subjects (Opulentia Tyranni, Paupertas Subiectorum). Though in this image we see the poor man contrasted with the tyrant who is taking surplus from the field, the pictura in the first illustrated edition of Alciatus shows a woman prone on a bed. Explaining this is a bit of Latin verse comparing the state treasury to the spleen: when it is swollen, the rest of the body wastes away. So too a great surplus in the coffers always comes with a “civic poverty” [civica pauperies], a conceit attributed to Caesar.
The second image is one of a series of prints of Parisian Emotions by the famous caricaturist Honoré Daumier. Here we see a man, down on his luck and a bit sickly, gazing dourly onto a window display of pieces of gold. Here we should recognize that this is not an image of the commodity, but only the commodity-form. No one displays francs in a window. Our unfortunate, likely a man who has lost his fortune through gambling, sees in the window-display an image of what prevents him from purchasing the commodity—its price in currency. Daumier’s caption is taken from the Sicilienne from Meyerbeer’s popular opera Robert le Diable. There the eponymous character, loosely based upon the medieval legend of the knight known as Robert the Devil, gambles away all his money and honor. In the libretto, the complete line is
L’or est une chimére
Sachons nous en servir:
Le vrai bien sur la terre
N’est-il pas le plaisir?
(Gold is but a dream
And we know how to use it:
Is not pleasure
The one true earthly good ?
Daumier’s completion of the line plays against this medieval tyrant’s vice of luxury. Gold is a dream for the one who cannot use it. Its unreality does not arise, as it does for Robert, from the frivolity that an aristocrat may treat it with but from the mystery that arises from its constant appearance in a parade of commodities that, for all of their variety and exoticism, nevertheless all mean for him some gold he does not possess. Wealth, and its disparity, no longer appears as the tyrannical usurpation of the poor’s labor in the field but as the mysterious appearance of money in the commodity, glistening on the other side of a window display.
